To Conquer Fear
by etudissal
Summary: A tale of action, adventure, bad science, and dacquoise. An OC self insert that regrets not watching more anime, watching too many criminal dramas, and not getting to eat at a Michelin starred restaurant before death.


Note: so, this is the first time I've written fic in a super long time, and not even in a genre that I frequently read. Smells like disaster, but hopefully someone will find it worth reading. Allons-y!

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When most people died, they probably didn't expect to open their eyes again only to find that their vision was taking a trip to crazy town and they couldn't move properly. This was because, in my opinion, most people didn't expect reincarnation. Not even those nutty religious types went this far; I was pretty sure that there was supposed to be a clean slate mind wipe somewhere, or, like, you know, Heaven. Of course, all this analysis came later. At present, I was nothing more than a twenty-one year old adult trapped in the body of a squalling baby.

To be fair, the squalling was my fault. Because I'd just _died_. And being dead was one thing; the thoroughly embarrassing manner of my untimely demise was something else entirely. I was humiliated. And more than that, I was darn freaking mad. It was only natural that my infant body decided that the best way to express my unholy rage was by unleashing the waterworks.

To this day, I'm amazed that my parents hadn't asked for a refund. I sure would have.

Those first few weeks were a nightmare in and of themselves. I never liked children, never really wanted any, and being physically helpless was near the top of my list of things I never wanted to experience. Everything was uncomfortable, and when I wasn't screaming my displeasure at the world, I was dead asleep. Babies sleep a lot. And also have a weird sense of time. I'd only intended to yell "this fucking sucks" for ten minutes or so before moving on to more productive things, but not only was I physically incapable of being productive, I also had the attention span of, well, an infant.

While the mind and body are arguably separate things, what happens to the body has an undeniable impact on the mind. You see what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel, yadda yadda yadda. These sensations are hard to ignore without practice, and adaptively, it's a good thing to have your thought process interrupted by reality enforcing its presence; makes you less likely to die by accident.

Eventually, I did manage to get enough control over myself to have a good old think session. I'd estimate that I was about three or four months old. That was around the age when infant hearing and language centers were reasonably well developed, which directly correlated to infant attention as related to auditory infant. I knew this because back in the day, I had more than a passing interest in cognitive psychology. I'd never taken an interest in child development, of course, but these sorts of things tended to seep in after you took enough classes.

Now that I could focus long enough to string coherent thoughts together, I inevitably found more things to be angry about. Such as: all the terrible science that my apparent reincarnation involved. According to everything I had been taught (also known as reality), it should have been impossible for the underdeveloped jello between my ears to support all the knowledge I had at my disposal, not to mention my fully formed personality. The neuronal connections just hadn't had enough time to form yet.

Yet, I was clearly influenced by the physical state of my infant body, as well as the still forming attention centers in my prefrontal cortex. This meant, apparently, that only some rules had to be followed, and I had no clue what those were. Because of magic, or something.

So I quickly resolved to ignore this problem for now, in hopes that it would maybe go away. Though this strategy had never worked on my homework, according to quantum mechanics, it might, so it never hurt to try.

It was around this time that I started paying serious attention to my surroundings. I soon found out that the reason I had no idea what anyone was saying was not due to my crappy baby brain, but because no one here spoke English. Or French, or Chinese. It took me a while, but I was able to identify the local linguistic mystery as Japanese. For the first time in my life, I wished I'd been more of a weeaboo.

So, this meant learning the language from scratch. Fair enough; everyone else my age (physical age?) was doing it. I had this one in the bag.

Around the glorious age of one year old, I was granted the privilege of autonomy. I'd learned to crawl some time earlier, but had always been enclosed by my crib, or physically restrained (read: held by the parental units). Now, though, I had the freedom to wander, roam, and explore the four corners of the living room. This was where I learned several important things. I'd been able to identify, and be confused by, the current time period due to the blatant lack of digital technology. There went my dreams of being an iPad kid. I also learned that wherever this place was, it sure wasn't Kansas anymore. Even if the technology was several decades out of whack, that didn't account for the lack of cars and canned baby food. Not that I wanted canned baby food; my mom's home cooking was great, even if my infant taste buds couldn't appreciate it yet. But the disparity between my memories and the current state of mass produced food items was worrying, and not just because I wasn't going to eat Oreos for snack any time soon. Also, my new name was Maya Chizuru, and my parents were Maya Kakeru and Maya Namie.

The most important thing I picked up, though, was the location of my mysterious reincarnation. I had not, in fact, been abducted by aliens and implanted into a clone, then placed in a giant terrarium for them to observe. But I could have been! That was a four month hypothesis in the making. But the real deal went something like this:

"Dada," I said, waving my arms in the universal gesture of "pick me up."

"Up we go," he said, hefting me into his arms. "Namie, we're going to head out for a bit!"

My mother's head popped out from the study, eyes rapidly taking in the sight of me trying to choke my father. She nodded. "But don't stay out too long. We're having dinner with the neighbors."

Grunting in response, my father soon whisked me through the door and into the dangerous world of outside. I'd been out of the house before, but this time, I noticed something key: every tenth person or so was wearing a terribly familiar headband.

Mentally, I despaired. On the outside, I flopped dramatically onto my father's shoulder.

I was stuck in the Naruto universe.

That certainly explained a lot of things, or more accurately, helped me handwave a lot of anachronistic details. It also explained the weird tingling I'd been feeling, which only intensified when I was near others. That would be, I assumed, the chakra. And here I'd been thinking that babies were supposed to feel so uncomfortable all the time.

My mind instantly bloomed with questions, possibilities, and more questions. I had some serious investigating to do. But first, I had to grow up.


End file.
